One of the things I’m always looking for is an easy way to take quick notes. Currently, I handle this with various Org capture buffers: one for temporary notes and another to capture notes for my journal when I want to keep the notes long term. Naturally, I want everything to end up living in Org mode so that I can easily access it through Emacs.
I’m reasonably happy with my setup—although I’m still looking for a good way to capture notes on my iPhone and easily import them into Emacs—but Jack Baty has an interesting post on using the builtin remember mode for capturing quick notes. He views it as a sort of permanent *scratch* buffer and has even written a bit of Elisp to make that correspondence more explicit.
Remember mode has been around for a long time and was even maintained by Sacha Chua for a while. It has it’s own manual that explains how to use it.
As much as I like it, I think that, barring special circumstances, Org mode is a better solution. Org’s capture templates can fill in a lot of boilerplate data for you and they’re instantly available with a single keystroke from within Emacs. It’s pretty easy to pop up a capture buffer even when you’re not in Emacs. Baty shows you one way to do this—although for remember mode, but the process is the same—and there are many others. Basically you just need some way of binding a key to call emacsclient with the -e parameter specifying what Emacs function to call.
Regardless, If you’re looking for an easy way to capture notes and you can’t or don’t want to deal with Org mode, remember mode seems like a great way of doing so.